Category: News Feeds

Last we checked in with Kirkland & Ellis’s Andy Calder, a partner and member of the firm’s global management committee, it was early in the pandemic (May 2020) and he sent a biting email to associates in the firm’s Houston office. The email scolded folks that they need to keep churning out billable hours and that the firm “isn’t a gravy train where you can just chill and be along for the ride” and that “the math is not going to work out well for you at the end of the year.” We (rightly, to my mind) chided Calder for his stark lack of compassion as most folks were and are simply doing the best they can to get through during the global freaking pandemic.

In the wake of the Texas winter weather-pocalypse, it seems Calder is showing a kinder side. Freezing temperatures and snow across Texas last week led to massive blackouts and loss of heat, which, in turn begot freezing and burst pipes. That put a premium on plumbing services, and Kirkland is stepping up to make sure employees are able to access a plumber in their time of need. As a tipster at the firm noted, “For all those who wanted to rag on Calder for the gravy train email….this is what hes [sic] really about.”

So what did the email, sent to all employees in the Houston office, say:

Appreciate that many folks in Houston have burst pipes and can’t find a plumber for love nor money. That doesn’t work, so we have managed to procure a plumber to prioritize Kirkland employees at a slightly reduced rate over the coming days. Essentially we have put him on retainer for the firm.

Employees are instructed to reach out to the partner, who isn’t Calder (or his assistants) that facilitated the hookup, and they’ll be put on the top of the plumber’s list. “Should be same day or worst case next day service. You will be invoiced a reduced amount, then we will pick up the rest.” Which is a nice perk, any way you slice it.

But folks are also advised not to share the offer beyond the “Kirkland family” in order to not “blow availability for colleagues.” (As Kirkland-ites are advised to schedule the plumbing appointments through the firm’s contacts, it’s unclear how this would even work.) I mean, sure, maybe your grandma desperately needs water, but she’s not going to bill for the firm, is she?

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on

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“It is a COMPLIMENT, not a COMPLEMENT, Olga. There is a huge difference!” Read the email I received from the senior partner.

He included links to Webster’s Dictionary and a grammar article. Three other partners and two senior associates chimed in, and I was deluged with cheap jokes for a few days. I had the pleasure of being cc’d on several of these emails.

My sin? I found the winning case law, received extensive praise for my research, and hastily responded on my device with a lot of enthusiasm: “Thank you! I appreciate the complement.”

After I read the partner’s reply, I wanted to send him screenshots of a few other Webster’s entries, namely “pedantic” and “punctilious,” but, as I was a first-year associate, I decided that might not be the brightest idea. Having said that, it didn’t change my view on the obsession lawyers have with perfectionism.

Who cares about comas and gramma!?

Wait.

I guess, in some cases, it is important, but I just don’t see a need to put perfection up on a pedestal. If you think you have been deemed an “arbiter of truth,” then you are — rather ironically — living a lie. My nouns may not be professional or totally correct, but if people can choose their pronouns, I should be allowed to choose my normal nouns (mine might actually be less confusing).

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean anything’s wrong with exploring pronouns, but, as most people who study communication and linguistics will tell you: the bottom line of communication is not its rules, but its message. As long as the other person clearly understands what you were trying to say, you have successfully communicated!

So far, I’ve been talking about communication outside of a professional context. If your contracts are full of typos, then, yes, that presents a bad image of you and the company you work for. But, in a situation like mine, I don’t see a great necessity for perfection.

Perfection is like spelling; sometimes it’s fine to get close enough. I think lawyers have a slightly unhealthy obsession with impeccability. Nobody is perfect, so why put up a facade? Why pretend? In some cases, I would argue that demonstrating your human fallibility by making mistakes helps you and others. It eases tension while making you more relatable and even endearing. Everyone makes mistakes, and, in a healthy environment, people will be more comfortable with you because they can see that you’re imperfect, too, no different from them.

But finally, and, perhaps, most importantly:

Perfection is not my virtue, but rather, the substance of what I do and say measures my worth!

The crux of the matter should not be linguistic, but holistic. The weight of the content, the depth of the research, the strength of the proposition — all of these factors of writing are significantly more appropriate than whether there are any spelling mistakes or grammar errors here and there. As a lawyer, I studied a lot and picked up a lot of skills. After all, it’s a competitive industry, and you’re expected to deliver high-quality results. Lawyers deliver high value, while editing and proof-reading are comparatively low value compared to the substance itself. Not only that, but it can be automated with the likes of spellcheck or Grammarly.

I would much rather mess up an English clause than a legal one. If I spend time fretting about perfection, then I will never consistently attain adequacy. It’s hard to focus on the bigger picture when you must scrutinize everything through the lens of a microscope.

Don’t fake flawlessness or bow down to worship at its pedestal. Embrace imperfection but deliver substance. The worst trade-off would be sacrificing functionality for the sake of appearance.

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Olga V. Mack is the CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat and Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security. You can follow Olga on Twitter @olgavmack.

Year in and year out, we watch law firm after law firm pay lip service to their commitment to diversity in the legal profession, with promises to recruit, retain, and promote more attorneys who are racially and ethnically diverse, LGBTQ+, and/or women, as well as those with disabilities. Despite these continued assurances, many Biglaw firms are falling behind when it comes to this important metric to create a more inclusive workplace, while others continue to perform beyond expectations, hitting it out of the park for diversity over and over again.

In our New Partner Watch feature, we writing about new partnership classes at selected firms. We tend to write about announcements that are, for one reason or another, interesting. For this current cycle, we’ll be focusing on diversity (or the lack thereof) among new Biglaw partners. If you think you have a class that merits scrutiny, please email us (subject line: “New Partner Watch”).

Today’s topic: The 14 new partners at Orrick, which the firm just announced on Friday. From their press release (emphasis ours):

Orrick is delighted to announce the promotion of 14 lawyers to the firm’s partnership, effective January 1, 2021. …

The class reflects Orrick’s longstanding commitment to inclusion. Seventy-five percent of the U.S. class members are diverse and/or women, exceeding the Mansfield Rule standard. Continuing a trend of the past four years, we are delighted to promote a member of the class while on caregiver leave.

“It took extraordinary grit, adaptability and character to complete one’s partner candidacy over the past year – and we believe those qualities are key to outstanding lawyering in the future,” said Orrick’s Chairman & CEO Mitch Zuklie. “We have no doubt that we will be a stronger firm because of this exceptional class.”

Congratulations to these 14 new partners on grabbing the ultimate Biglaw brass ring, and congratulations to Orrick on the impressive diversity of its class. The new partners are diverse according to many metrics — by practice area, geography, racial or ethnic background, and gender. On top of that, Orrick continues to demonstrate that it’s possible for attorneys to practice law and attain the greatest heights of success while balancing their family lives by promoting someone who was on caregiver leave.

Fresh off announcing its new diversity pipeline program, Orrick went above and beyond for the sake of diversity in its new partner class. If you’re in-house and you care about the diversity of your lawyers, you should know that Orrick does as well.

Can any other Biglaw firm compete with Orrick’s true commitment to diversity?

Orrick Promotes 14 to Partner [Orrick]

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Protesters are unhappy with something.

They’re going to set up shop outside your building next Tuesday.

What do you do?

The conventional wisdom screams: Alert building security. Alert the public relations folks. Alert key business people. And, when the protesters show up, ignore them.

The first three items are no-brainers; the last stems from universal experience: If you send somebody downstairs to talk to the protesters, you’ll have created a viral moment. Instead, let a dozen people with signs march around for a while. Let them get tired. They’ll go home. And you’ll have done your job: Minimized the disruption, and kept a small public relations issue from becoming a larger one.

But the protesters are coming, so someone schedules a call.

On the call, you’ll hear all the usual ideas:

“We should hand out pieces of paper that explain our position. That will make the protesters go home.”

But: “The protesters are coming to protest. They’re not coming to go home. If you hand out pieces of paper explaining our position, the protesters will set the pieces of paper on fire, creating a viral moment.  Do not hand out pieces of paper.”

Or:

“The other tenants in the building will complain. We really must invite the protesters inside.”

But: “The other tenants have no basis to complain. If the protesters are on public property, then they have the right to protest. And bringing protesters inside the building compounds the security problem and escalates the situation.”

Or:

“Why don’t we tell the protesters to meet with our lawyers at the lawyers’ office?” Followed by: “The lawyers will never let all the protesters into the lawyers’ office.”

A bunch of pablum. You put your head in your hands; you put the phone on mute; you start to cry. You wait for the others to figure out that the law firm would invite only one, not all, of the protesters into the law firm’s offices.  Finally, somebody says something that resembles the truth: “That probably won’t cause the protesters to go away, but it’s better than having them protest outside our offices. Before the protesters arrive, we could extend an invitation for their lawyer to meet with our lawyer at our lawyer’s office. If there’s any negotiating to be done, it could be done there.”

That’s plausible.

It probably won’t work, because the protesters want to protest; they don’t want to negotiate. But it may be worth a try.

You think to yourself: “The conventional wisdom is occasionally wrong. But often there’s a reason for it. If protesters are going to appear outside your office, let them have at it. If you’re lucky, few people will notice, and eventually the protesters will get bored and go away. At a minimum, your actions won’t have made a bad situation worse.”

You should think about all hard problems anew. But you should consider the possibility that there’s a reason for routine answers to routine questions.

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Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com

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Paul S. Padda, a first-generation American, was born in Ithaca, New York. His parents emigrated to the United States from India in the 1960s. After Paul Padda’s father earned his doctorate degree in genetics from Cornell University, his family relocated to the island of St. Croix, which is part of the United States Virgin Islands. His father took a position as a Professor and later became Vice-President of the University of the Virgin Islands. Paul’s mother, an educator with a master’s degree in early childhood education, taught kindergarten and retired as an education specialist . At a young age, Paul Padda’s parents instilled in him the importance of working hard and treating people with respect.

Following 16 years of significant legal experience involving high stakes litigation, Mr. Padda decided to form a law firm that would assist individuals and businesses in vindicating their legal rights. Given his own life experiences and having witnessed injustices first hand, Paul decided to dedicate his legal talents towards helping others. Believing that every person has an obligation to give back to society and make a difference in one’s community, Paul and his law firm dedicate significant time and resources to various organizations and outreach activities dedicated to empowering local communities.  For instance, Mr. Padda and his law firm established the Community Justice Fellowship in partnership with the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada which, among other things, pays the salary of a full-time lawyer. Being raised in a multicultural environment and having a diversity of friends fostered an appreciation in Paul that all people, regardless of their background, are basically the same and share the common desire to be treated with dignity. Recognition of these important principles has guided Paul’s legal career as both a civil litigator and former federal prosecutor.

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